The MacBook Neo made quite a splash when it landed in March. $599 for a MacBook felt groundbreaking, and it was easy for casual onlookers to declare that Windows laptops had no true answer to it.

But what if I told you there was a Windows option that was better in almost every way? That’s the HP OmniBook 5, a laptop you’ve probably never heard of unless you watch the space closely. I’ve been recommending it ever since I tested it last month. The price has been fluctuating, but more often than not, the 14-inch model was selling for $500. You read that right: $500. Today, the cheapest, most consistent price you’ll find it for is $730 over at Walmart, but I’ve seen the HP frequently drop the price from $1,050 down to around $500.

And just take a look at what you get for the price, because it’s absolutely stacked. It comes with 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage, double what you get on the $599 MacBook Neo. There’s a 16-inch version as well, if you like the idea of having a bit more screen real estate work with.

The HP OmniBook 5 is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X, a highly efficient chip that gets great, all-day battery life that’s at least on par with the MacBook Neo. If you haven’t used a Windows laptops in a few years and still think they can’t compete with MacBooks in battery life, you’re sorely mistaken.

The 16 GB of memory on the OmniBook 5 is particularly important to note, as it’s one of the big points of contention with the MacBook Neo. Being stuck at 8 GB in 2026 feels cruel on principle, and while testing it I was able to load up the MacBook Neo and easily find its breaking point. The 16 GB of memory on the HP OmniBook 5 is enough that you’ll never have to worry about how many tabs, applications, installations, or downloads you have going simultaneously. Combined with the better multicore performance of the Snapdragon X, it enables a kind of freedom that lets you forget about the hardware and focus on the task at hand. Don’t get me wrong—the MacBook Neo has its place, but calling it the undisputed king of budget laptops just isn’t right.

The HP OmniBook 5 Is Only $500

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Specs and performance don’t tell the whole story, and Apple has never been known for offering tons of specs for cheap. But the OmniBook 5 14 is also an attractive design in a highly portable package. At 0.5 inches, it’s exactly the same thickness as the MacBook Neo and right around the same weight too. Does the MacBook Neo have a bit more style and personality? Absolutely—especially if you fancy one of the bolder color options. But I’d say the OmniBook 5 is a very pretty laptop in its own right. It’s also made of aluminum, sturdy and well-built in your hands. The hinge is balanced nicely, allowing you to open the lid with one finger. It doesn’t feel cheap.

After years of suffering in silence with her trauma, Vega eventually called out her accuser in one of the most public forums in existence: Facebook. Within just a few days, she was contacted by eight other women, most of them also American college students studying abroad, with eerily similar stories of their own encounters with Vela, who was known to many as “Manu.” This three-part docuseries traces how Vega found the courage to stand up to her attacker and how the far-reaching power of using one’s voice on social media can be used for more than just sharing memes and family photos. Ultimately, Vega’s efforts led authorities to determine that Manu had assaulted between 50 and 100 young women.

Star Wars: Maul—Shadow Lord

OpenAI on Tuesday announced the next phase of its cybersecurity strategy and a new model specifically designed for use by digital defenders, GPT-5.4-Cyber.

The news comes in the wake of an announcement last week by competitor Anthropic that its new Claude Mythos Preview model is only being privately released for now—because, the company says, it could be exploited by hackers and bad actors. Anthropic also announced an industry coalition, including competitors like Google, focused on how advances in generative AI across the field will impact cybersecurity.

OpenAI seemed to be seeking to differentiate its message on Tuesday by striking a less catastrophic tone and touting its existing guardrails and defenses while hinting at the need for more advanced protections in the long term.

“We believe the class of safeguards in use today sufficiently reduce cyber risk enough to support broad deployment of current models,” the company wrote in a blog post. “We expect versions of these safeguards to be sufficient for upcoming more powerful models, while models explicitly trained and made more permissive for cybersecurity work require more restrictive deployments and appropriate controls. Over the long term, to ensure the ongoing sufficiency of AI safety in cybersecurity, we also expect the need for more expansive defenses for future models, whose capabilities will rapidly exceed even the best purpose-built models of today.”

The company says that it has homed in on three pillars for its cybersecurity approach. The first involves so-called “know your customer” validation systems to allow controlled access to new models that is as broad and “democratized” as possible. “We design mechanisms which avoid arbitrarily deciding who gets access for legitimate use and who doesn’t,” the company wrote on Tuesday. OpenAI is combining a model where it partners with certain organizations on limited releases with an automated system introduced in February, known as Trusted Access for Cyber or TAC.

The second component of the strategy involves “iterative deployment,” or a process of “carefully” releasing and then refining new capabilities so the company can get real-world insight and feedback. The blog post particularly highlights “resilience to jailbreaks and other adversarial attacks, and improving defensive capabilities.” Finally, the third focus is on investments that the company says support software security and other digital defense as generative AI proliferates.

OpenAI says that the initiative fits into its broader security efforts, including an application security AI agent launched last month known as Codex Security, a cybersecurity grants program that began in 2023, a recent donation to the Linux Foundation to support open source security, and the “Preparedness Framework” that is meant to assess and defend against “severe harm from frontier AI capabilities.”

Anthropic’s claims last week that more capable AI models necessitate a cybersecurity reckoning have been controversial among security experts. Some say the concern is overstated and could feed a new wave of anti-hacker sentiment—consolidating power even more with tech giants. Others, though, emphasize that vulnerabilities and shortcomings in current security defenses are well known and really could be exploited with new speed and intensity by an even broader range of bad actors in the age of agentic AI.